How Jeff Bezos rules his Amazonian empire

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' managerial style is full of quirks and
punctuation revealed in Brad Stone's 'The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon
Became the Everything Store' last week. With this insight knowledge, Radhika
Sanghani picks out the top seven techniques that helped Bezos rule
Amazon.

Jeff Bezos is a skilled master of the question mark.Photo: AFP/Getty Images

The simple question mark is a crucial part of Bezos’ strategy. Just one solitary ? in an email is enough to make most Amazon employees drop their smartphones in panic.

The ? tends to hover over a forwarded email – generally a complaint or issue – and means the unfortunate recipient has only a few hours to solve the problem before presenting it to a succession of managers and eventually forwarding it onto Bezos. It is known to provoke fear and instant action.

2) No-nonsense sex

When Bezos found out that customers who browsed Amazon’s sexual wellness category were receiving marketing emails about lubricants and ‘intimacy facilitators’, he took immediate action.

A ? went straight to his team, and he demanded to meet them in person for an explanation. Their reasoning about boosting sales and promoting products fell on deaf ears.

Bezos met with his top retail and marketing heads, including Steven Shure, the vice president for worldwide marketing, and said: “So, Steve Shure is sending out e-mails about lubricants.”

He insisted they shut down the practice immediately and the company adapted its policy to terminate email marketing for heath and personal care categories. They also decided to build a central filtering tool to ensure that category managers could no longer promote sensitive products.

3) Emails

As the ? technique shows, Bezos is an email mastermind. He understands the value of emails, and even has a public e-mail address: jeff@amazon.com. He is known to read many customer complaints, and then forward them on to relevant Amazon employees.

He also asked his employees to come up with suggestions for email newsletters. But – their pitches were not up to his standards. He told the group, who had written the material they were pitching to him: “Some of this is just bad writing. If you were doing this as a blogger, you would starve.”

Clearly Bezos understands the high quality writing needed in emails.

4) Laughing

In most circumstances, laughter signifies joy/mirth/pleasure/a combination of the above. When the laughter is coming from Bezos, it means anything but. Brad Stone describes it as “a pulsing, mirthful bray that he leans into while craning his neck back.”

Bezos is known for his ability to sum up a situation in few words. Stone collated the top examples in The Secret of Bezos:

“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

“I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”

“Do I need to go down and get the certificate that says I’m CEO of the company to get you to stop challenging me on this?”

If I hear that idea again, I’m gonna have to kill myself.”

“We need to apply some human intelligence to this problem.”

6) Being right. Always

Bruce Jones, a former Amazon supply chain vice president, says that Bezos’ criticisms tend to be right – even when he has no real knowledge of the field. During one presentation led by Jones about distribution centres, Bezos said, “You’re all wrong”, and began writing on the whiteboard.

Jones says, “He had no background in control theory, no background in operating systems. He only had minimum experience in the distribution centres and never spent weeks and months out on the line.” But Bezos laid out his argument on the whiteboard, and “every stinking thing he put down was correct and true,” Jones says. “It would be easier to stomach if we could prove he was wrong, but we couldn’t. That was a typical interaction with Jeff.”